NAB Recap: Big Data, Mobile Backup and Flash

The NAB conference brought thousands of experts under one roof to share their unique insight on one area or another, and to demo their companies’ new products. There were quite a few announcements at the gathering, and a handful managed to catch our eye.

The first update is from Aspera, which didn’t reveal a new offering. What the company did do, however, was open up a booth that displayed some of its big data solutions to the media industry – a fantastic indication of where this market is heading. The massive shift publishers and other companies have been going through in the past couple of years is quite clearly moving in the same direction many other industries have already started.

Moving on to some actual new products, Studio Network Solutions debuted an interesting software solution. The globalSAN Xtarget Storage Server promises to turn an Intel Mac (OS X 1.6.8 or Lion) into a SAN using equipment that a studio probably already has, cutting costs and labor as a result.

The same day Archiware and Drobo launched an app of their own for a different audience – mobile workers. The former’s P4 Backup2Go desktop backup software has fused with Drobo’s BeyondRAID to create a storage platform with an ‘easy to use’ web-based interface.

Last is Ross Video’s flash-based playout server. For about $20,000 a production studio can get its hands on the BlackStorm and its four hours of internal SSD video storage.

“The BlackStorm Playout Server makes an excellent addition to any mobile environment,” said Todd Robinson, Marketing Product Manager, Servers – Ross Video. “The new solid state drive offers reliability, quick response time and lower power requirements. The functionality of BlackStorm is the perfect fit for the playout of “EverGreen” content such as stills, animations, wipes and transitions.”